Episodios

  • 393 Senior Executives Common Presentation Errors In Japan

    393 Senior Executives Common Presentation Errors In Japan
    Jul 8 2024
    It is not often that we get a front row seat to watch a group of very senior businesspeople compete with each other when presenting. If you like blood sports, then this is right up your alley. This is a zero-sum game for seizing the brass ring and even better, it is conducted in the full glare of the assembled masses. This is an annual event, which, as a Master Trainer of presentations and public speaking, I always look forward to. Being the eternal optimist, I always imagine that this year I will be delighted with the high levels of professionalism on display. This could be a leading indicator that the senior ranks of companies are understanding the importance of presentations, persuasion and storytelling skills. We all know the pressures in business and the levels of competition are getting more and more intense. Throw in the rapid advances of technology and we have a boiling red ocean of difficulty, which we all must deal with. These executives are always a good gauge of the ability of business to keep up with the demands. Sadly, another year of no change and no improvement. These executives have two minutes to convince the voting members that they should be selected over their rivals. On this occasion, there were no women in the mix, which in itself is a worry, but that is another podcast. Every year I take detailed notes on what I am seeing and not seeing. Typically, no one seems to have a clue about what to do with their hands. More importantly, they have no idea how to make their hands work for them. Gestures add strength to our words and are a powerful amplifier of our message. Holding our hands around stomach or groin level or even worse, behind our backs, eliminates the opportunity to use this powerful message driving medium. Gestures need to be held up high, so that they are easy to see. The maximum holding time is up to fifteen seconds, after which the gestures lose all their power and just become annoying. Pointing fingers or fists at the audience are very aggressive gestures and are best replaced with using the open palm instead. The desired effect is the same without the aggro. Eye contact is another major lost opportunity. In a one-minute period, we can engage directly with ten people and we should be doing that all the time we have available to us. The alternative is what these executives were doing, which was not looking at the audience and just vaguely scanning the room, not focusing on anyone in particular. A type of fake eye contact effort. It was a large venue with hundreds of people and so optically, when we select one person down the back to focus on, the ten people sitting around them all feel we are looking directly at them too. We can get ripple effect going with our eye contact and in one minute engage with eleven people. This wasn’t happening. The result was the speakers seemed detached and not engaged with their voters. This makes the message more difficult to drive in because the power of the eye contact is completely diffused and rendered useless. Voice strength is important too. One of the aspirants asked me for a few hints about five minutes before he was due to start speaking. I know him well. He has a very demure manner and is rather softly spoken. I told him to simply increase his vocal power. He may have feared that he would be screaming, but I assured him that would not be the case at all. I knew that this would help him to come across as more credible and confident. He did that and turned out to be the highest vote getter. A few of the speakers let their voice trail off at the very end of their talk, when doing the wrap up. This is extremely bad and leaves a weak final impression. Don’t let it fade out. Instead make it a crescendo at the end and finish with strength. Another surprising thing was how little the speakers understood about how to use a microphone. There was a microphone stand for them to use and almost all of them stood too far back away from the microphone. They were losing vocal power as a result and this diminished their dynamism in the eyes of the audience. One of them added to his woes by getting his feet positioning wrong. If you point your feet at ninety degrees to the audience, you are balanced and will be able to focus on the entire audience. If, like him, you get the angle wrong and are off fifteen degrees, without knowing it, your body positioning is now turned such that you are ignoring about a third of your audience on one side. Don’t ignore your audience. To my horror and astonishment, one company President of a very large and well-known firm, chose to read his entire speech from hand held notes. This is a two-minute speech and he can’t manage that at his level? I was thinking that is a pretty sad state of affairs at his age and stage. There is absolutely no need for that. If you do, it ensures you look down at the page and do not engage your ...
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    13 m
  • 392 Presenters Need Strong Discipline In Japan

    392 Presenters Need Strong Discipline In Japan
    Jul 1 2024
    Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries. This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study. A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed. Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it. I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way. The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it? I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation. Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned. She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan. Early in, she said something disturbing. She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk. This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately. Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control. Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time. Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long. I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others. When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more. The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish. There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material. This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand. In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second. People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated. I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop. The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience. Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to. I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants. As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan. Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings. This is really bad. Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for. Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy. My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule. She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up. Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career. It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies. She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods. This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you. Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum. She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience. No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary. Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry ...
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    12 m
  • 391 The Japanese “Way” of Presenting

    391 The Japanese “Way” of Presenting
    Jun 24 2024
    Foreign companies often want to appoint a Japanese person to be the head of their Japan operation. This is done on the basis that they will know what is best for the business. This proclivity has made many washed up, tremendously mediocre Japanese Presidents a lot of money and substantially extended their careers. At some point the shareholders, or the Board, start to ask why there are no results in the Japan operation. The local chief usually manages to fend off these “rude” enquiries for a few years until the jig is up. In comes the shiny new President from headquarters who has been despatched to “fix” the Japan operation and turn it around. This typically leads to another array of problems, but that is another podcast. The idea is that the Japanese way of doing things is the best for Japan – “when in Tokyo do it the Tokyo way” kind of thing. I remember trying to sell our High Impact Presentations Course to a foreign financial firm. The Japanese lady I was speaking with told me she wanted the “Japanese way” of presentations instead of the Dale Carnegie global best practice way. It is an interesting question, isn’t it. How far do we go to accommodate the Japanese culture and way of doing things, while still getting the maximum benefit from doing things at the highest possible level? We do meet foreigners here who have been here for a long time and have quietly gone troppo. They are trying so hard to assimilate they are out Japanesing the Japanese. What should we do about how we present in business? Should we go troppo too and do it the Japanese “way”? What is the Japanese “way”? Here is your handy dandy guide to going troppo when presenting in Japan and how to blend in with the locals. 1. Monotone Speak in a complete monotone voice and forget about using any voice modulation, pauses or hitting of keywords and phrases. Some people will say this is just how it is because the Japanese language is a monotone language and so there is no chance for vocal variation, as we have with foreign languages. That is almost true, except even Japanese speakers can use two mighty levers to elevate their presenting world. Speed and strength will produce the variety needed. Slowing words down for emphasis or speeding them up both work well. Taking the strength down to speak in a conspiratorial whisper is good and so is using power to hit keywords. 2. Be Seated Invariably, when I am invited to speak in Japanese the layout will feature a desk with my name written on paper either draping over the desk or sitting upright on a paper tent. The microphone will be on a low stand. This is to make it clear that I am humble and I am not standing above the audience, making myself out to be better than everyone else. It also means I lose my access to my body language and most of my gestures. 3. No Eye Contact Looking a superior in the eye in samurai times would get your head cut off for insolence. The culture ensures that we don’t make direct eye contact with people when we speak and so Japanese presenters have migrated this into their presentations. They never look into the eyes of their audience members. It also means that they haven’t realised that normal conversation and giving presentations are two different things and different rules can apply. The engagement of the audience members through six seconds of individual eye contact are foregone in order to keep your head on your shoulders. 4. Weak Voice Speaking softly is a cultural preference and so why not keep that going when presenting? The speaker is under-powering their presentation, so often, it is hard to hear what they are saying and there is certainly no passion involved as demonstrated through voice projection. This guarantees the speaker has almost zero presence in the room. 5. Few Gestures Holding the hands in front of the groin, behind the back or together at waist level are all favourites. Each position locks up the hands and cancels out using any gestures to emphasise the message being delivered. 6. Casual Posture Having the weight displacement 70/30 is common and usually it results in one hip being kicked out to the side. Swaying around is also popular as they speak. These are all distractions from the message, but no one is conscious of that, so they keep doing it. 7. One packed slide Cramming everything on to one slide, with five tiny different fonts and six colours, is definitely a typical effort by Japanese presenters. The rule that we have to be able to understand the point of the message on the slide in two seconds has been tossed overboard in favour of a full noisy baroque effort. Good luck with out Japanesing the Japanese when it comes to the Japanese “way” of presenting.
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    12 m
  • 390 How To Give Smooth Deliveries When Presenting In Japan

    390 How To Give Smooth Deliveries When Presenting In Japan
    Jun 17 2024
    The Lord Mayor of London covers the whole con-urban spread of greater London and the Lord Mayor of the City of London covers 1.12 square kilometres of the financial district with a population of nearly 11,000 people, so it is a bit confusing. Alderman Lord Mayor Professor Michael Mainelli gave a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce recently. I didn’t know anything about him, but sitting there listening to him, I immediately noticed how smooth his delivery was. He had good pacing, good voice strength, some appropriate humour and an engaging manner. He is well educated at Harvard University, Trinity College Dublin and the London School of Economics. We all know that being well educated and teaching at University are no guarantees of public speaking ability and prowess. In the Lord Mayor’s case, he has had a very successful business career as a founder. He is a chartered certified accountant, computer specialist, securities professional and management consultant. His talk was an amalgamation of capabilities built up across a broad spectrum career. Being highly successful in your career is a great contributor to exuding quiet confidence as a speaker. Often, when we are making our careers, we may be trying to be a bit too strong, a bit too strident, too loud, too forceful because we are in a hurry. Bringing these attributes into the speaking world is not a great idea. Professor Mainelli’s demeanor was that of a person with good levels of self-awareness and an unhurried manner. That unhurried manner was very convincing. He didn’t come across as trying to be persuasive, but was persuasive. I was thinking about that for myself. I am a very high-powered presenter, well that is always the feedback I get after my presentations, so I take it at face value. However, can I learn something here and take a leaf out of his book? Obviously, throughout his career, Professor Mainelli has had numerous opportunities to speak in public, and it shows. What we see today is the accumulation of all of those years of speaking, and it is a very polished example of how to be persuasive. Was he like that at the beginning? I doubt it because this is a finite skill we develop, not something we are born with. We all benefit from substantial practice of any art. Perhaps speaking opportunities were thrust upon him and he learnt how to become better. I should have asked him, shouldn’t I, when I was chatting with him after the talk. I will remember that for the next time I meet someone who is so highly skilled. What can we take away from his example? Firstly, study the art or do as much speaking as possible and keep adjusting your techniques on the basis of your evolution as a speaker or even better – do both. This sounds simple, except I ran away from every speaking opportunity until my early thirties. I was terrified of public speaking and would have been one of those people ranking it in surveys ahead of death! You may also be an avoider like I was. If you want to become competent as a speaker, you have to give talks. It is like trying to teach someone to swim on the deck of the pool. It is a great theory, but nothing happens until you dive into the water and get wet and start swimming around. Grab the slightest chance of speaking in public. Yes, it is terrifying at the start, but it gets less so as your frequency mounts up. Tony Robbins, in one of his books, talks about how he purposely decided to speak as much as possible. He realised that most speakers only get a few chances a year and he could match their annual total experience in just weeks, if he got enough speaking spots. He went for it and has turned that speaking facility into a career, business and massive wealth. Being nine feet tall probably helped too. Getting proper coaching is also the quickest way to get much better. I have done some public speaking training with different organisations, but nothing has matched the High Impact Presentations course that we teach. I don’t say that to sell training, but as an objective statement based on my experiences. My broader point is to go get the training. I lost a decade of potential experience and career advancement because I let fear rule me. I didn’t engage my brain and say, “the way to overcome the fear I have is to get proper training”. I was too stupid for that logical consequence of having a problem and needing to fix it. Don’t be like Greg! I still look for any chance I can get to speak, because I know this will help me to keep pushing myself and keep improving. My records tell me I have delivered 558 public speeches so far. Am I satisfied with that? No, I am certain that I can still improve and get a lot better. All I need is the chance to keep polishing and keep improving. I now aim to achieve the zen like “mind of no mind” effortlessness that the Lord Mayor of the City of London displayed in his remarks. What ...
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    12 m
  • 389 Go for Greater Innovation When Presenting

    389 Go for Greater Innovation When Presenting
    Jun 10 2024

    “Will It Blend” was a genius idea from Blendtec, kicked off with a $50 budget in 2006. The campaign saw Tom Dickson’s videos go viral and take a boring blender manufacturer into the pantheon of marketing presentations. They have 187 videos on YouTube and 845,000 subscribers to their channel. So far, their YouTube channel has had 294 million views. Not bad for a blender maker duking it out in a red ocean of blender suppliers.

    I suggested to a client of mine that they take a leaf out of Blendtec’s playbook and do the same for their boring drill bits. Being my client, I actually never used the word “boring”, but at least floated the idea for them. “Will It Drill” I thought could be a goer for them, however they never went for it. Instead, they keep doing the same old promotions using catalogues of products with potential buyers.

    Another client of mine is an equipment manufacturer, and I came up with a suggestion for them. They get a lot of calls to their call centre for help with running the equipment. These calls often come from part-time staff in the stores who can’t understand how to use the machinery or fix simple issues. They are not well trained and with the difficulty of recruiting staff only likely to get worse, the chances of them getting better trained are fairly remote.

    I suggested that they create a series of “reality TV” style tutorial videos for the 20% of the problems which make up 80% of the calls to the call centre. This would relieve the call centre staff of boring, repetitious work. It must be extremely hard to tell someone over the phone how to fix machinery.

    You make the videos once and so the investment is able to be amortised over many years, because the machines don’t change that much and the issues are probably the same all the time.

    This means no scripts and low production values. Initially I thought to get a real technician in the company’s technician uniform, to go through the 12 steps or 7 steps or 5 steps or whatever, to fix the problem. Edit the video well, to make it easy to follow and put this up on YouTube and on their website. When people call in with these typical issues, the call centre staff can just direct them to the videos and say “call us back if you have any further problems”. The chances of that will be very low I would guess. This was an elegant solution, I thought.

    Then I had a further thought and a more radical consideration. I wondered about going a completely different direction from reality TV to Hollywood. Given the people in the stores are not technical people, why not get someone who is also not technical to walk them through the steps, so it is more accessible? There is a local foreign businesswoman here I know, who does a lot of MC work for luxury products. She is really beautiful, really blonde and speaks excellent Japanese. That would be a killer combo for this job in Japan. I would also dress her up in an evening gown, with her hair done perfectly, to accentuate the tinsel town glamour. Get her to point out what needs to be done step by step. It is a counterintuitive approach and may even go viral like Blendtec.

    This got me thinking about how we present what we do. Are there some areas where we can think in a differentiated way about how we present our solutions to potential clients? What about for your business? What are you doing now and what could you do if you really considered something innovative and differentiated? We all get into a rut of the same old, same old about how we present our brand and our solutions. Year after year, we do the same thing and probably basically the same approaches as our competitors.

    Blendtec has shown how to take a very dull, utilitarian solution and make it sexy. My “Will It Drill” client never took any action when it wasn’t so difficult. For whatever reason, inertia took over, and he is still working hard to sell drill bits in a crowded market. He can only differentiate on price, which is not something any of us want to do.

    I don’t know if my client will go for the glamourous blonde Hollywood bombshell solution to fixing common requests for help from clients, but I hope he does. I am also thinking now about how do I take my own advice and what can I do with my training business? How about you? Has this article stimulated any would be Blendtec marketing innovations for you?
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    11 m
  • 388 Pacing Your Presentation In Japan

    388 Pacing Your Presentation In Japan
    Jun 3 2024
    We are usually asked to speak at events by some hosting organisation and these can be breakfast, lunches or evening occasions. Each has its challenges. Not that many people seem to be great in the early mornings and the energy level of the audience can be very low, as they are still sleepy. This sleepiness is definitely a problem for after lunch presentations too. Many are ready for a nap after hoeing down a big meal in the middle of the day. In the evenings, people can be tired after a hard day’s work and their concentration spans can be limited. As the speaker, we may suffer the same issues, but the adrenalin kicks in and we become sufficiently energised to complete the presentation. There are issues around how much information an audience can absorb when attending our talk. We, of course, are sold on the topic or subject because we have prepared a presentation on it. We have gone to a lot of trouble and have been highly motivated to give the talk. We may let that enthusiasm blind us to the reality of what it is like on the receiving end. This is where presentation technique become very important. I see so many speakers who ignore half their audience when they present, by simply not getting the feet placed at the correct angle – ninety degrees to the audience. These speakers get their feet angle at forty-five degrees and without releasing it, they are now only talking to one side of the room and are deleting the remainder from their view and attention. Don’t do that. Another issue is they lose sight of their audience. They are looking over the heads of everyone or looking at the screen or looking down and not making any eye contact with the attendees. This is a massive mistake. We have to make sure we are watching our people like a hawk. If we see they are losing interest or their energy is flagging, we can take remedial actions to fix the problem. By looking at members of our audience for six seconds each, we can make sure we not only engage the listeners, but we can always gauge their interest levels in what we are saying. If the energy goes down, we may need to get them physically involved by raising their hand to a question. This question should be designed so that basically everyone has to raise their hand. This way we get the maximum involvement and this helps to wake up those who are drifting off into slumber, with their eyes open. As we say “the lights are on, but nobody is home”. Another method is to pause and stop speaking for about ten seconds. Actually, ten seconds can feel quite long, as we are used to continuous palaver from speakers. This is called a “pattern interrupt” because we provide a consistent audio rhythm when we are speaking. When we turn it off, the sleepy attendees wake up because something has changed. They become alert again, springing from a deeply rooted and basic survival tactic. If we have been going hard with our delivery, we can wear some audience members out. We are hitting them with so much energy, it is thrashing them. This is something I have to be careful about, because I am a very high energy presenter. If I see I am wiping people out with my overpowering energy, I need to bring in more lows and reduce the crescendos. This is not that easy, because as the speaker, we get into a rhythm too with our pacing. We are up and away and it is hard to rein yourself in, especially when you are enjoying yourself. One of the unnecessary pressures we place on ourselves can be too much content for the time available and we rush. This gets very ugly, very fast. The audience realise immediately that the speaker has screwed up the time allocation for their delivery and now panic is setting in, as the presenter races through their slides. It looks very unprofessional, and as it comes at the end, it poisons our final key impression with the crowd. We may have been doing very well and everyone is enjoying the talk and getting a lot of value. We suddenly go crazy and start rushing. Effectively, we delete all that good will we have built up during the presentation and we replace it with a negative recollection of ourselves. Rehearsal is the cure for the time control problem. However, if you cannot do a rehearsal and you realise during the delivery that you have to stop, don’t rush through the slides. When you do that, the jig is up and everyone is on to you. Instead, just stop on the slide you are on, wrap it up and call for any questions they may have. Remember, only you know what is in the slide deck. When you race through and show them what they missed out on, the unhappiness is increased. It is better to not reveal the gap. When doing the Q&A, don’t forget to repeat the question, so that everyone can hear it, as long as it isn’t a hostile question. Never repeat or amplify an incoming unfriendly missile. With that situation, we always paraphrase to take the heat out of the question. Don...
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    11 m
  • 387 Prepping For Your Presentation

    387 Prepping For Your Presentation
    May 27 2024
    I am terrible. I procrastinate about starting the assembly of my presentation. Invariably, by holding off starting, I create time tension, which forces me to elevate the priority of the presentation and lift its urgency above all the other competing demands on my time. I should start earlier and take some of that tension out of my life. So, everyone do what I say, don’t do what I do! Start early. The first point of departure must be working on the clarity needed around the key message. What is the point we want to get across? There are always a multitude of these and it is quite challenging sometimes to pick out the one we want to work on. Part of my problem is perfectionism immobilising me. So let’s all suspend perfectionism and just be happy to get started, knowing we can finesse what we are doing later. Once we have settled on the key message, we need to make sure that anyone would care about that message. It might be intoxicating for us, but it may not motivate anyone else to get excited. A reality check is in order before we move forward. Will there be enough traction with the audience we are going to be presenting to? We should have a fairly clear idea about who will be interested in our topic and what some of their expectations will be. After the reality check, we start to construct the talk. Counterintuitively, we start with the end. We settle on the actual words we need for our conclusion, because this is a succinct summary of what we will talk about. Getting that down to a few sentences is no easy feat. It is simple to waffle on, but it requires skill to be brief and totally on point. Next, we plan out the chapters of the talk to deliver the goods to prove what we are saying in our conclusion is true. In a forty-minute speech, we can usually get through five or six chapters. Here is a critical piece of the puzzle. We need to rehearse the talk and carefully watch the time. It is very difficult to predict accurately the required time until you run through the talk. We may find we are short on the content or too long and we need to make adjustments. We certainly don’t want to discover that on stage in front of an audience. We all feel cheated when the presenter start rushing at the end and the slides go up and come down in seconds. You simply can’t follow what they are showing to the audience and that leaves a very negative impression at the end of the talk. Now we plan our start. This is the first impression of our talk. Well, that is not quite true. The audience will be making critical judgements as to how we command the stage and how we get underway. Juggling slides on the deck is a bad look at the start. That should definitely be left to someone else, so we can get straight into our opening. Don’t thank the organisers at this point, we can do that in a moment. We don’t want to waste the opening with a bunch of generic bumf. We need to grab hold of our audience at this point and then never let go of them. The audience may be seated in front of us, but they are a thousand miles away with their collective consciousness floating above the clouds. They are focused on everything else but us and we have to induct them into our orbit and command their complete attention. So, we need to plan this first sentence extremely well, because it will set the tone for the rest of the event. Remember that fear of loss is greater than greed for gain, so we hit them with how they can avoid losses. We might say something along these lines, “it is shocking how much the change in the market is going to cost us all and we are talking about serious money here”. That start fits just about any talk subject and is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of starters. The market is always changing and invariably some will gain and others will lose. Our job is to point the audience in the direction of how to avoid losing money. The cadence of the talk is we need to tell a story every five minutes to keep our audience with us. Storytelling is like superglue and will bind the listeners to us until the end of our presentation. That means we need at least five or six good stories which make the point we are selling. Including people they know or know of, is always good because that technique is a great equaliser and connector with the audience. We need to prepare two closes – one for our formal end to the talk and another for the final close after the Q&A has ended. We need to brief the organisers that after the Q&A we will wrap it up and then they can bring the proceedings to a formal end. If we don’t do that, they will just end the talk before we have a chance to drive in our key message for the last time. We will know if the talk has succeeded by the faces we see in the audience. If they are paying attention right through, that is a good sign. If they are nodding in agreement, that is an even better sign and if they are engaged through...
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    11 m
  • 386 Thrashing AI When Presenting In Japan

    386 Thrashing AI When Presenting In Japan
    May 20 2024
    I was in a recent debate with the Dale Carnegie organisation about approving the publication of my new book “Japan Leadership Mastery”. There were concerns about copyright, because I was drawing on the Dale Carnegie curriculum for the book. A book is a powerful content marketing tool, so excluding the Dale Carnegie oeuvre defeats the purpose. One argument I made to them was I could rewrite the book and strip their content out and replace it with generic stuff summoned up from AI. This is the problem we all face. AI makes originality very difficult to sustain when it is so easy to coagulate all that is currently out there. I create these podcast episodes every Saturday morning and when you have composed over three hundred articles on presentations, it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. I try to find angles I haven’t explored before and to write them in a way which an AI prompt could not replicate. When we are creating our public presentations, we face the same problem. Any fool armed with AI can come up with a presentation which will assemble the best of what has been published already or at least what the machine could find from public sources. How do we make sure that what we are presenting is not getting pushed down into the sludge to battle with what AI can churn out in under a minute? How can we thrash our AI powered competitors within an inch of their lives? At this point in time, we are lucky that most of the AI production for presentations is generic and sounds generic. Originality for me means the choices of words like “thrash”, “oeuvre”, “coagulate”, “sludge”, and “churn”. These are unlikely candidates to emerge from an AI prompt to create a presentation on any subject. I have always tried to write like this anyway, to make myself stand out from the crowd. Today that AI assisted crowd is surging. In fact, it is accessing the entire global production of text on every topic. Don’t panic yet. Our experiences are sacrosanct turf, which protects us from AI mindlessness. No AI prompt can capture what has happened to us and our recollection of it. In our storytelling, we access those incidents and we use them in concert with our take on the lessons from what happened. This is a guaranteed way to remain one step ahead of AI generated content. Of course, AI can magically bring forth a slew of stories of other people’s experiences, but as a presenter relating to an audience what happened to us is unbeatable for making that human connection. I resisted sharing a lot of personal insights and experiences for a long time. I am a very private person, an introvert in fact, who has to operate as an extrovert. It is always tough. People who know me would never know that because I push myself in public to be outgoing. When I finally got over myself and started including more things about me and my family in my talks, I noticed that I connected more powerfully with the audience. AI won’t know that level of detail and so can never match us in a live situation. The other arena in which to slay the AI dragon is when we are on stage, standing there in front of a live audience. Our rival presenter may have been fed a steady diet of homogenised content from AI in prepping their talk, but can they rock the audience like we can? This is where knowledge and execution diverge. It is the same with technical presenters. They have all the data, statistics, details, etc., but they speak in a monotone and murder their listeners. They are dull dogs, with way too much micro data plastered all over their one slide, which in fact should have been spread over six slides. They are unable to create some buzz with the crowd. They have no clue how to penetrate that invisible barrier between speaker and those being spoken to. They don’t know how to bring gesture, voice tone, body language and eye contact together in an unstoppable vortex to completely capture the room and drive in their message. No amount of AI prep will help them. This is where the AI powered speaker runs out of gas. They can put up the bare bones of the AI generated presentation, but they don’t have the ability to flesh it out and make it a triumph. When you know what you are doing, you can dip into elements of AI for help, but for presentations, you have to be able to stand up and cut it. This is the Age of Distraction and Era of Fake News and we only have one shot. These days, with the micro patience of audiences we face, you don’t get any margin. If you sound boring, they will immediately lunge for their mobile and depart from you and your message. They will escape straight to the internet, to much more intriguing worlds like their email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. AI is only a problem if you are a crap presenter. For the rest of us, let’s give AI powered presenters a sound public thrashing and blow them out of the ...
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